First off, I'm sorry that my first post is going to be a long one, but I feel it's important to explain this in detail.

Up until today, I didn't believe it. I thought people who believed in conspiracies and secret messages were, well, kind of goofy. Oh, I'd occasionally read things and find them interesting, but I didn't think they were true. And then my eyes were opened by an unlikely source, but I guess truth is where you find it.

I was playing the game "Spinletters" on the popular social networking site "Facebook", and I had just started a new game. My words came up: triumvirate, Freemasons, inflate, oxalate, converge. My past readings told me what I needed to know about the Freemasons, which piqued my interest. I felt the term "triumvirate" preceding it was rather interesting as well.

I had no idea what "oxalate" meant, so I looked it up, and consumption of oxalates can be deadly. If cattle graze on too much greasewood, or if people eat too much Sorrel, it will cause death. Greasewood is a flowering plant that does well in dry conditions, and for those of you who didn't know, Texas- the biggest beef producing state in the US, is having a severe drought right now. I thought that was interesting enough, and then I started looking into Sorrel. That's when I "went down the rabbit hole".

There is Sorrel in California. There's a Sorrel, Louisiana. There's a Sorrell Aviation in Missouri. No big deal, right? The Sorrel in CA is at St. Mary's College. Sorrel, LA is in St. Mary Parish. Sorrell Aviation in MO? It's located in the town of Saint Mary. I realized then that something strange was going on.

I looked back at my game, and saw that the "IUMVI" in "triumvirate" were highlighted. I don't know why, but Roman numerals sprang to mind. Since Latin doesn't have a "U", I took that to be "V-1", as it would be in the English alphabet. Then, things get interesting. Add the two end numbers, multiply by the center. Add the 2nd and 4th numbers, add to the center. 1, 4, 1000, 5, 1. 1+1=2, 2 x 1000= 2000, 4+5=9, 9+2000=2009. At this point, I called my wife to verify my math. I was feeling a little lightheaded at this point, but was determined to press on in order to see where this took me.

The first word I got all the letters for was "inflate", and this is my conundrum. I don't know how it fits in. It could mean "blow up", in a demolitions sense. It could mean "expand". It could even mean "inflation" in a financial sense.

Anyway, "inflate" doesn't unscramble into a different word. Neither does "triumvirate", which is the second word I completed. They were perfect words, pure words, words where the letters could not form another word. "Freemason", on the other hand, becomes "forenames". I actually completed "Freemason" and "Converge" at the same time- more on that later. Anyway, when "forenames" became a possibility, I looked at possible forenames for "converge", and was reminded of the playwright William Congreve, whose last name is an anagram of "converge". And, as I stated earlier, I'd already stumbled across one forename, Mary.

William... Mary... William and Mary, which is in Williamsburg, VA, also home to Yorktown Naval Weapons Station. Perhaps the more sinister version of "inflate" is in play.

Anyway, I "made" the word "converge", which was replaced with "vermilion", and made "oxalate" and got "notability". "Notability" led to "arkwright" (a cabinet! or chest maker). "Vermilion" gave me "Lewis", while "arkwright" led to "pyrite". As you know, iron pyrite has another, more common name- "Fool's Gold", and was referred to in The Silence of the Lambs by the anagram Louis (Lewis) Friend.

Oh, and the last three letters I needed to complete "freemason" and "converge" were a, t, and e. "Ate", which goes back to the Oxalate.